Small Farm, Adept (Patreon)

Hello Adepts! This week I made the Small Farm (20x25), a quaint little map for your players to stumble across while on the dusty trail, perhaps earning themselves a nice meal from the owner if they can help with some chores around the house. It's always nice to have guests who can cast Mending or Prestidigitation, so I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to make friends around a farm. 

Also, since I've been in the Fall mood recently, I went ahead and whipped up an appropriately recolored version of this map. As some of you have pointed out, this type of recoloring can multitask as a sunset version, to cut the difference between the regular day/night ones, and I'm sure there are a number of other uses as well if you're crafty about it.

1. A pretty simple map, really. I didn't think it would be appropriate for this one to be particularly complicated, since I can't imagine anyone would intentionally make a small farm with anything less than a straightforward layout. That said, I tried to make it as interesting as possible without getting out of control- I wish I saved pictures of all my other configurations of the farm, house, well, and pen, all of which felt too boring or unrealistic somehow despite all being essentially made of the same components. I think I settled for this one since it's a little more spread out, giving some amount of cover from several directions and leaving big gaps open for all-out fights. 

2. Tell you what, I was 100% disinterested in drawing all these wooden fences, and 200% disinterested in drawing cobblestone fences. Fortunately, I had long ago drawn a little Village Center with small patches of farms mixed in, which provided me with both usable stretches of fence and some plants to fill in the garden with (after cleaning and tweaking some things). While I was digging through its PSD, I also grabbed the trees and rocks, which all looked to be approximately the size I was looking for to fill this map with. 

The only part of this map I wasn't very sure about was the floor inside the house. It struck me that wooden floors might be a little too fancy for a little farm like this, and instead, something like cobblestone would have fit the theme better. However, I do like the look of wooden floors and how they contrast with the rest of the colors, so I leaned into it, making the roof for the house a pretty swanky, high-end tile which reinforces how nice this small house is. 

3. As I mentioned last week, I liked the colors I had ended up using for the Chapel, particularly the grass, dirt, and trees. The palette is much more extreme than what I used to use, which, in hindsight, shows how bland the colors actually were. This time I ended up tweaking the dirt color somewhat in order to help highlight the plants, though I think I should have gone way further since the dirt in the garden feels a little too solid, not as loamy as you'd expect. I think it would have been better off much darker, maybe a little redder, though I can only assume I'd dislike the effect. I'll toy around with some more 'natural' colors in the meantime, there's some chance that I make another farm map in anticipation for Halloween, so I should probably start experimenting now.